“Today’s sorry newsrooms–silent, smokeless, boozeless, cursor-cursed funeral parlors–bear no resemblance to the divine hell-holes that persisted at newspapers and wire services until the mid-1970s. They were seas of grunge and debris…a universe of controlled chaos, suspended in a perpetual stinking fog of cigarette smoke and worse.”
— Diana McLellan, journalist, former gossip columnist, and longtime Washington editor of Washingtonian magazine
And I thought you had to watch them in a theater or TV. But I was wrong. A few weeks ago I kept seeing a movie trailer for a film called Hostage. “We gotta see this movie,” I told Barb. Then I noticed it was showing at BMWfilms.com. Oh, shit. It’s a commercial. Never mind. No…mind. Go to BMWfilms.com and watch this eight minute… (movie? film? cinema? commercial?). I don’t what you call it but I watched three of these (about 8 minutes each) and I don’t remember when I’ve seen anything more entertaining. I won’t try to review these. Or categorize them. Just watch them. If these are commercials, they’re not like any commercial I ever saw. They did make me think about owning a BMW and that’s probably what it’s all about. My, my, but these were good. Directors like John Woo and Tony Scott (Spy Game, Crimson Tide, True Romance, Top Gun)…actors like Gary Oldman and James Brown. And I’m sitting here in front of my little Thinkpad watching these stream on a DSL connection thinking, “I could watch 90 minutes of this, easy.” So. Is this the advertising of the future? I don’t know now. But I’m thinking I would have paid to watch this BMW commercial and I’m already paying to not watch lots of other commercials. The winds of change are blowing.
I find that’s true when I’m reading almost anything by Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block or Robert B. Parker. I just love these guys and find myselt reading their dialogue aloud (but quietly). Just finished Elmore Leonard’s When the Women Come Out to Dance and working my way through Block’s Enough Rope. While I’ve never been all that found of short stories, I loved these collections. Alex Cross fans will have to read James Patterson’s Four Blind Mice but I thought it was disappointing. Robert B. Parker’s Spencer series suffers from the same formula-rot but Parker has given us Sunny Randall and she’s a nice change but just barely.
A friend of mine, who happens to live in Kennett, Missouri, received a call from a woman this week but couldn’t hear her because of the chainsaw in the background. She said “Excuse me, I’ll go outside.” When he asked about the chainsaw in the house she explained “I needed something fixed and his skillsaw was broke.” Makes a guy homesick.
“Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”
From a William Safire Op/Ed piece in the NY Times.